Teen Dreams

“Superbad” and “Delirious.”

Michael Cera and Jonah Hill in “Superbad,” a movie directed by Greg Mottola and co-produced by Judd Apatow.

ROBERT RISKO

The twenty-three-year-old comic actor Jonah Hill has an aureole of electrified hair, a coarse whine, and plump hands, which he waves around like an unhinged conductor. Hill specializes in playing huffy near-hysterics. He was part of Seth Rogen’s crew in “Knocked Up”—the petulant boy who had a nervous breakdown in a hospital waiting room when he realized that disease might be lurking nearby. In “Superbad” he teams up with Michael Cera, a sweet-faced charmer who drains all tension out of his lines. If Hill is as frantic as the Three Stooges wrapped into one, Cera (from the TV series “Arrested Development”) is so circumspect—a young man hampered by ethics—that he never makes himself clear. The two actors play inseparable high-school pals, Seth (Hill) and Evan (Cera), who must soon part company and go off to college, and they are magically funny together. I recently wrote that I could happily do without any more movies devoted to the breaking of the male bond. Yet here’s an uproarious and touching picture on that theme, directed by Greg Mottola, who made the 1997 independent film “The Daytrippers,” and co-produced by Judd Apatow, who wrote and directed “Knocked Up.” Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who were high-school buddies in Vancouver, began working on the script when they were thirteen. The movie still displays vestiges of infantile glee, but, after much revision and some obvious guidance, the structure and a lot of the dialogue have become ripely Apatovian. Like “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” the movie combines desperately filthy talk with the most tender, even delicate, emotion.

“Superbad” is a suburban mock-epic. Seth and Evan, with the help of their friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), agree to buy the booze for a party that the coolest girls in their class are throwing. The boys are convinced that if they deliver the goods the girls will get so drunk that they’ll make out with guys by mistake. “We could be that mistake!” Seth shouts, hopefully. Getting themselves to the party, however, turns out to be a journey somewhat more difficult than that endured by the Greeks coming home from Troy. Fogell, a primal nerd with a needle nose and a voice like a vibrating thistle, procures a fake I.D., which identifies him simply as McLovin, a Hawaiian organ donor. As McLovin, he gets clobbered by a thief as he’s buying the liquor; a couple of antic cops then decide that the bruised and shaken boy is really a macho hero, and drive him all over town, getting smashed and shooting off their guns. (They want to be teen-agers themselves.) Meanwhile, Evan and Seth fall in with some pugnacious lowlifes having their own party. The boys’ friendship almost falls apart under the strain of arriving at the proper gathering with an armful of booze.

In spirit, “Superbad” isn’t so different from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982) and other rude teen comedies made years ago. But the tone of “Superbad,” like that of other recent teen movies, is so profane and anatomical that it would shock Sean Penn’s loutish Spicoli. The boys in “Superbad” are all Internet-porn addicts. Their talk is not just dirty but bizarrely detailed—spangled with fantasy, odd practices, and curious devices. They know more about sex than boys did a couple of decades ago, but they’re frightened by what they know—the expectation of performance is so much more explicit. For them, the only mystery is flesh itself, and the presence of a willing girl sends them into anguished fits of dithering. The movie succeeds as a teen’s wild fantasy of a night in which everything goes wrong, revised by an adult’s melancholy sense that nothing was ever meant to go right.

At times, Mottola loses that kind of perception of character and destiny in mere slapstick: Jonah Hill gets knocked over by a car not once but twice, and is smacked with a baseball bat as well. The scenes of the two gleeful cops (Rogen and Bill Hader) horsing around with Fogell never rise above the level of goofy TV. Mottola is at his best when he sticks to the trials of the Seth-Evan friendship and pulls quirky rhythms out of his actors. He creates a couple of minor miracles. For example, there’s a scene in which Cera is stuck in a room with a group of meatballs who think he’s some hot young singer and won’t let him out. He begins to croon in a light, uncertain voice, and the guys are so stoned that they start singing backup, as if he were an MTV star leading them along. Mottola is also adept at the kids’ casual meetings and run-ins—the way, for instance, the boys want to look at the girls’ bodies in school but turn away embarrassed, even though the girls are eager to be looked at. And, working with Martha MacIsaac and Emma Stone, as Seth and Evan’s prize targets (both of them smarter than the boys), Mottola skillfully manages the missed connections and semi-incoherence of sozzled boy-girl chatter—the talk that hops around like a needle skipping from one groove to another and then back again.

The kids have their party, but the sexual encounters fall on the comic side of catastrophe. At the same time, there’s a gentle and entirely intentional homoerotic strain—never acted upon—running through the Seth-Evan friendship. In a startling digression, Seth airs his memories (which we see in flashback) of a time when he was a little boy and couldn’t stop drawing penises. A kind of exuberant art show follows, with page after page covering school desks—simple line drawings of magnificent organs and phallicized trees, artillery, and towers. The sequence is hilarious and charming—a child’s garden of verses for our time. What the teen-age Seth really wants from his romantic life remains a mystery. When the boys, the morning after the party, run into the girls in a mall, and the couples pair off and go in opposite directions, Seth casts a sorrowful glance at the receding Evan. Heterosexuality, that infinitely dangerous terrain, will be a place he enters gingerly and with more than a little regret.

The media celebrity system is kept aloft not just by powerful handlers but by layers of semi-anonymous toilers—press agents and talent bookers, and, well below them, headwaiters, bouncers, and chauffeurs—all of whom help build and guard a mystique of which they, as much as anyone, are the victims, since most of them are disposable. But at least they work and are paid at the stars’ behest, whereas paparazzi get paid only when they violate someone’s privacy. This nearly criminal group of intruders are caught in a situation that almost guarantees self-loathing: much of the time, they pursue minor celebrities who they know are just the products of chance, luck, and the frantic labor of people like themselves. “Delirious,” the new film by the writer-director Tom DiCillo—whose comedy “Living in Oblivion” (1995) is the best movie made about independent filmmaking—takes a clear-eyed but sympathetic look at a Manhattan paparazzo, one Les Galantine (Steve Buscemi), who lives on the edges of a system that abuses but also needs him. Les is a cynic, a moocher, and a loser, yet, in his unhappy way, he is also an ever hopeful novitiate in the Temple of Fame. He wants that scandalous tabloid cover shot that will earn him a week or two of esteem. In his world, that’s as good as it gets.

Les picks up a pretty street kid—Toby (Michael Pitt), who wants to be an actor—makes him his assistant, and teaches him how to get into parties, cadge goody bags, and other necessary skills. They live in Les’s grubby apartment, but, as outcasts from their families, they are both spiritually homeless—two lost men spinning around the city, trying to force their way past sullen gatekeepers. As DiCillo admits, the movie bears more than a casual resemblance to “Midnight Cowboy”—with Dustin Hoffman as the battle-scarred bum and Jon Voight as the beautiful outsider—but there’s also an element of “A Star Is Born.” Les and Toby have multiple encounters with a troubled young pop star (Alison Lohman), who sees something innocent in Toby that touches her. But his innocence is easily shed. Toby eventually hooks up with the singer, but first he lives with a talent booker (Gina Gershon), who gets him his own “reality” cable show and makes him a star. On his way up, Toby leaves Les behind.

“Delirious” was shot quickly, with a handheld camera, and some of it feels raw, both visually and emotionally. Buscemi is haggard and bilious, a bottom dog who will never give up, and Pitt’s angel face seems to rot after a while. Some of the plot turns don’t quite make sense, but this is still a strong, bitter movie about a milieu that the director intimately understands. DiCillo is terrific at mapping out what might be called the traffic aspects of fame: the rushing in and out of hotel rooms and clubs; the pecking order; the fluent sycophancy; the back-and-forth of favors and rebuffs. “Delirious” comes close to satire at times, but it doesn’t exaggerate a brutal and unstable process. Les, despite all his sordid habits, is a baby compared with the genuine professionals working the scene. And Toby may be on top, but you’d have to be a fool to think he’ll stay there long. The movie is exhilarating in a way that only hard-won knowledge of the world can be. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.